Web Forms vs Win Forms

[Tim O'Pry]

While I searched the forums on DevX for a similar topic prior to this post,
the last few hundred seem to be dominated by the 'Web Services...' thread(s).
I would imagine the WebForm/WinForm topic has been covered before. If so
and someone will point me to that thread, I would appreciate it.

If not -
For new internal application development, I've been weighing the pros/cons
of using WebForms vs WinForms. This is an application that in the past would
have been a typical 3-tier client/server application. The users are only
employees, all running Win32 (W2K) clients using W2K server and SQL2000 on
the backend.

If we go with WinForms, the application would be hosted with Terminal Server,
which does away with the need to push installation / updates to the clients.
TS is already up and running in this orgranization, so that investment has
already been made.

The development team is familiar with ASP, but has much more knowledge and
experience with traditional Win32 applications. Plus there appears to be
much more flexibility with UI components with WinForms (third party or internally
developed) and more ease interfacing with Office applications (albeit slightly
and this is not much of a factor).

Anyway - if we have no need to run this application on anything but Win32
clients and external access will be minimal and can be handled through Terminal
Server and the experience of the dev team is heavily weighted in the traditional
Win32 / 3-tier methodologies, are we missing some other benefits of WebForms
/ ASP.NET that we should be considering?

If anyone is aware of any articles or books on this topic or simply wants
to voice their opinion, I would be interested in any pros/cons you think
are relevant. Also - any issues using .NET with Terminal Server?

Tim

[John Butler]

"Tim O'Pry" <topry@henssler.com> wrote in message
news:3c8f6dff$1@10.1.10.29...
> If anyone is aware of any articles or books on this topic or simply wants
> to voice their opinion, I would be interested in any pros/cons you think
> are relevant. Also - any issues using .NET with Terminal Server?


Tim, I'm sure the gurus will speak up, but I have faced this decision twice
now. For one major project, we're coding using Winforms and for the other
Webforms. The first will use Citrix clients to access an application on a
central super server. The other will use a browser model and
Winforms/ASP.NET/IIS/SQL2000.

Sorry to say it, but the decision has to be based on the project you're
dealing with. The Winforms project requires a lot of client-side
functionality, which is much easier to do on a traditional Win32 client
environment.

Web forms are amazingly functional, but you will never get away of from the
fact that you're using a browser, which by nature is stateless, and if you
have a business need that relies on a lot of communication between client
and server/business object or client-side functionality, then the winforms
environment will always be quicker and superior IMHO. Having said that, I
really like ASP.NET and server-side scripting continues to impress me with
its functionality.

My 2cents...

[Greg Gates]

Hi Tim:

Search for "Windows Forms and Web Forms Recommendations" in the on-line VS.NET
help.

For a number of my applications I am choosing WinForms for the UI. However,
I plan to make a WebForm version available at some point.
The beauty of n-tier architecture is that having different UI's for the same
application is much easier.

thanks, Greg


"Tim O'Pry" <topry@henssler.com> wrote:
>
>While I searched the forums on DevX for a similar topic prior to this post,
>the last few hundred seem to be dominated by the 'Web Services...' thread(s).
>I would imagine the WebForm/WinForm topic has been covered before. If so
>and someone will point me to that thread, I would appreciate it.
>
>If not -
>For new internal application development, I've been weighing the pros/cons
>of using WebForms vs WinForms. This is an application that in the past would
>have been a typical 3-tier client/server application. The users are only
>employees, all running Win32 (W2K) clients using W2K server and SQL2000
on
>the backend.
>
>If we go with WinForms, the application would be hosted with Terminal Server,
>which does away with the need to push installation / updates to the clients.
>TS is already up and running in this orgranization, so that investment has
>already been made.
>
>The development team is familiar with ASP, but has much more knowledge and
>experience with traditional Win32 applications. Plus there appears to be
>much more flexibility with UI components with WinForms (third party or internally
>developed) and more ease interfacing with Office applications (albeit slightly
>and this is not much of a factor).
>
>Anyway - if we have no need to run this application on anything but Win32
>clients and external access will be minimal and can be handled through Terminal
>Server and the experience of the dev team is heavily weighted in the traditional
>Win32 / 3-tier methodologies, are we missing some other benefits of WebForms
>/ ASP.NET that we should be considering?
>
>If anyone is aware of any articles or books on this topic or simply wants
>to voice their opinion, I would be interested in any pros/cons you think
>are relevant. Also - any issues using .NET with Terminal Server?
>
>Tim